A lot of people have asked me,
when I build a site for them ... when can I start making money with my
website ? How much will I make in a week ? When can I stop working
outside
and do this full time.? Should I invest in it full time ?

None
of these questions I
can answer for them, as there are too many variables.

How
much demand is there
for what you do or sell ?How much competition do
you have ?How well linked and ranked
can you make the site ?

And
on and on and on, which
makes predicting when will it pay for itself ... much less make a
profit,
impossible to say.

Now I can say this with
certainty, no " New " site is going to make you a living right off the
top, in fact expect to wait and work at promoting it, for 6 months to a
year or more, before you make anything at all. Assume you won't make a
dime of profit for that first year.

This
sounds terrible I know,
but if you were to try and set up shop in real life, you would get told
the same thing, that if you don't have enough capital to float for a
year
without a major profit, you can't afford to go into business.

Now,
to those who tell you
otherwise, they are, " mis informed " . Link
building takes time, the research and trial and
error of what
keywords
to use, takes time. Getting good ranking and high listing for your
keywords
on the engines, takes time. And the most important of all, getting the
right traffic to your front page, takes time.

These
are all analogous to
what a real life shop does, advertisement, getting listed in the phone
book, having signs out and flyers out etc. Until they are" noticed " by the local
community and have customers, seeking what they sell, walking in the
door.
And the Net community is a LOT larger.

Now
is there anything you
can do to speed this up ? Sure there is ...

Research:Go to the engines and plug
in your topic type and see what the others, that are on those first 5
pages
have done. Back track their link set up. Figure out what key words are
most commonly used for your site topic. Go to anyone of a 100 keyword
suggestion
tools and find more.

Plan
your keywords:Now use those keywords you
found on that most important front page and everywhere else. Use them
in
the header, meta tags, and title slots. Never mind your company name,
as
no one knows it .. YET! But plan out the text so that the keywords a
potential
viewer might plug into the engine as search words is ON your pages,
often.

Link,
Link, Link:Link the site up to as many
different " related" sites, engines and directories as possible. And
keep
doing it !

Stay
focused:Pick a topic type and stay
with it, you can diversify, but be sure that you stay within your topic
type. I.E.: Yes you could sell luggage alongside of herbs, but I
wouldn't
recommend it. Why ? Lack of focus. The engines categorize your site as
belonging to one basic genre. If you try and spread it out too far, in
the hopes of covering all possibilities, you dilute its potential. Pick
a topic and stay with it.

Hire
a good designer:Yes, you can do it yourself
with any number of online builders, however its going to tend to look
like
it. You need to be one of a kind to stand out. And unless you have the
time to devote to learning all the details of what makes a site work,
hiring
it done is much more cost effective and should net you better results.

Pick
a good host:Since you now know you will
have to wait before the site pays off, pick a hosting that you can
afford.
If your host is costing you more than 10.00 bucks a month your paying
too
much. Even at that, that's 120.00 a year, you do the math. So be sure
to
choose one that you can afford to absorb the cost of maintaining it,
while
you promote it.

Get
on the engines:This is the last yet
most important job, getting on the engines. The Net is much too large
now
for the old ways of surfing the net. The engines are the only way to
find
anything. If your not in them, you don't exist.

I
wouldn't bother paying
to be on any engine, as again it can take months before you
are " noticed".
It can take months to get into the top spots. So why pay for a listing
in 72 hours ? Your throwing money away. Even if you could
somehow
grab the first spot right off the top, people will go with who they
know,
first, with what is familiar, before they will try an unknown.

Spread
it out and get known:If no matter where the viewer
goes in your topic, there you are, just by sheer repetition they will
eventually
notice you and come take a look. So hook it into directories and other
sites of related goods, as often as possible.

Make
all your customers happy customers:As with our cousins, the
brick and mortar shops, the best advertisement costs you nothing at
all,
word of mouth. Or in the case of the Net, the written word in a e-mail,
or group posting, singing your praises. This is where your " fame"
spreads.
Your best and foremost tool for any business is your reputation, make
it
a good one.

All
Businesses are a risk:Keep in mind, even if you
do everything right you can still fail, simply
because of factors
outside your control. If you sell luxury items for example, which is
most
of us, and the economy takes a dive. It won't matter if you have the
best
priced luxury goods going, if the buying population is struggling to
pay
rent, your not going to do as well. There are ups and downs to
everything,
some months you will do well, others you won't ... period.

There
is no such thing as
get rich quick on the Net or in real life. The net allows us to take
that
risk in a much less costly, if done correctly, venue, to where we can
afford
to try it and see where it goes, but it takes work and time. In the
meantime,
hang on to your day job :)